Choosing your Channel
A channel is a type of marketing – e.g. SEO, Paid Search (Google Ads), Email Marketing, Social Media (which, by the way, requires budget in order to be effective these days)
- What is your goal? To increase awareness of your brand? To increase sales? The goal will help dictate the best channels to use.
- Outside of that, it comes down to which channels have worked best for you historically and which channels you enjoy using and/or have the resources (e.g. staff and money) to use?
Using SEO for BFCMGT
What I love about SEO is that once you strategize it, it is evergreen and only requires small modifications each week. Also you could theoretically use this to fuel your social media campaign.
To start with, build a page on your website that you will use each year. It does not matter what you call it – just don’t put the year in the URL as you will use this same page each year and for best SEO benefit you don’t want a new URL each year. Call it bfcmgt if you like!
Now you need content… while you are figuring that out, you need to put something on this page. Here are some ideas:
- Newsletter signup (bonus points if you are able to create a separate list for those that want to be notified when you add or change your sales on this page)
- Freebie downloads – do you have some PDFs you have put together in the past that could be shared here? Maybe a gift guide?
- Links to your social media.
You will keep this page up and running all year round though you do not need to have it visible in your navigation. Once you pull your sales off the page, you should still have newsletter signup, freebie downloads and links to social for example. You could even have a date as to when you will put your sales up for following year.
Optimizing for Search Engines
If you are in an industry where people will be searching for your offers (e.g. you are an ecommerce business), you definitely will want to optimize for Black Friday as your priority. You do not need different pages for BF, CM and GT – you can mention all 3 on the same page.
If you use Shopify for example, you can easily create collections called Black Friday and Cyber Monday and products to these collections. Furthermore, you could bulk edit the page titles and meta descriptions of these pages to include “Black Friday Specials” for example. After this holiday event is over, update your titles and descriptions again. You can also add or remove this collection from your navigation as you desire.
Optimizing Paid Search (Google Ads) for Black Friday
- Promotion extensions
- Mention Black Friday in your ads (headlines and/or descriptions)
- Countdown timer
